The company he works for, Resource Uniformity One, LLC, known to its employees both behind its back and to its face as RU Serious, occupies four floors of the building. There are additional corporate and sales offices in several major cities. The company is well-established and highly profitable with over eight hundred million dollars in annual sales.
He goes to the conference room nearest his office, puts the donuts on the table and leaves. When he returns fifteen minutes later, all but one of his team members is sitting at the table, each facing a portable PC. Only one glazed donut remains, lying languorously on its side in the middle of the box, surrounded by clumps of sugar icing.
Ray is one of three Special Projects Managers in the company. His team is comprised of four senior level technologists and one intern. They are working on a new top secret software project: an online multi-media transcoder for the Internet.
A round, smiling face greets him with his first problem of the day. "Good morning, Ray. Lewis can't find his code."
Ray sits down, opens his "Work" notebook and begins entering the date, the words "Team Meeting", the first name and last initial of each person on the team and a short list of action items. Without looking up he asks, "Where is your code, Lewis?"
"I have a theory."
"What is that?"
"A tesseract."
"What do you mean?"
"It's somewhere in a tesseract. You do know what a tesseract is, don't you?"
"Yes I do. It's a four-dimensional spatial object. A hypercube."
"Then you understand the difficulty in trying to locate my code, since it could not only be anywhere in space, but anywhere in time."
Ted of the round, smiling face, a senior developer and Lewis's nemesis where all things technological are concerned, raises a half-eaten donut over his head. "I have a question for Lewis."
Lewis places both elbows on the table with his hands in a prayerful gesture, each fingertip touching its opposite, tilts his head slightly to one side in his best Mr. Spock impersonation and looks across the table at Ted. "Yes, Doctor McCoy?"
"Why are you still talking?"
Margaret, the one woman in the group and the person responsible for technical documentation, has been typing steadily from the moment Ray entered the room. Lewis turns to her and says, "Strike that last comment from the record please, Margaret."
"I'm not a court reporter, Lewis."
"I smell a harassment suit," says Ted.
"Not from me," says Margaret. "I like my career and I plan to keep it."
Lewis reverts to Mr. Spock. "Lieutenant Uhura. As translator you are responsible for decoding alien messages. You intercepted an alien message and translated. Although I recognized your words, I do not understand their meaning."
Margaret stops typing. "What I mean, Lewis, is that you can kiss my ass. Besame el culo. ¿Comprende?"
"That is not logical."
Ray finishes writing, arranges his notebook, pen and PDA on the table, looks around the room as if for the first time. "Where's Andy?"
The others look back and forth at each other. Finally, Ted speaks for the group. "He has a final in finite mathematics tomorrow he hasn't studied for, so we sent him home with the box of chocolate donuts."
Ray reaches to the center of the table and punches a button that activates a projector. A large digital whiteboard glows on the blank wall at one end of the room. All of the developers login to the whiteboard software from their PCs.
"You know, Lewis. I actually don't mind that you can't find your code."
"Why not?" Lewis asks.
"Because we haven't finished the initial design. That's the first step. Until we finish the first step, there is no reason for anyone to be writing code."
"Why can't we just start coding now and you bring us the requirements later?"
"Because that's not how it works."
"Ray, if I've said it once, I've said it peta times. The first commandment of programming is, If I really want to code something, I don't need any specs. If I don't want to do it, all the specs in the world won't be enough."
"Why is she still talking?" This time it is not Ted, but the silent one in the group, Anderson, who has contributed to the conversation. Anderson seldom actually speaks, preferring instead to use a large dictionary of digital audio files to speak for him. Anderson believes that civilization is at an end, that creativity is no longer possible and that all social interactions are genetically preprogrammed and combinatorial in nature. The "Why is she still talking?" sound emanating from Anderson's PC, unrecognizable to anyone except Anderson as a quote from a cartoon program called King of the Hill, once prime time, now available on-demand as is every other TV program and movie ever made, seals Lewis's fate.
"I'm not a she, Anderson."
"Why is she still talking?" "Why is she still talking?" "Why is she still talking?" "Why is she still talking?" "Why is she still talking?" "Why is she still talk-talk-talk-talk-talk-ta-ta-ta-ta-talking?" Anderson is also equipped with special effects.
"Anderson, I said . . ."
"Why is she still talking?" "Why is she still talking?" "Why is she still talking?" "Why is she still talking?" "Why is she still talking?" "Why is she still talking?" "Why is she still talking?" . . .
